Martina Malsbender

The "Cultural Centre Sinsteden" is situated in an old farm building, which is located on a large site between Neuss and Cologne. The place is affected by the adjacent fields, the width of the landscape and the surrounding low buildings with their typical reddish-black gable roofs.

The cultural centre contains two different museums, one for historical agricultural machinery, and another for an important collection of modern stone sculptures of the internationally well-known artist Ulrich Rückriem. At the moment there is a spatial separation between those two museum types "local history museum" and "art museum", which leads to a differentiation of the visitor groups.

To arouse the interest of the different groups of visitors in the other type of exhibition the new double museum unites the two collections in one building. Consciously it is not placed on the existing property, but occupies one of the surrounding agricultural fields. By its perpendicular orientation the new museum retains the scale of the existing farm building and forms a new ensemble with it. Between the buildings a square is generated, which is borderd by the café and the entrance of the newly-created museum park. This park is offering an area for temporary festivals and provides a new location for the existing enclosures of the chicken breeding.

According to the typical village structure and the rural environment, the typology of the barn is reinterpreted. Below a "large roof" the exhibition of the agricultural machinery is arranged. The groups of Ulrich Rückriem’s stone sculptures are “stamped" out of this roof as open yards.

At the common end of both exhibitions the visitors arrive at a bench “in the middle of nowhere”.
Here they have to come to a decision for their way back...

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